SPORTS BUSINESS; An Afternoon at the (New Sports) Museum

By RICHARD SANDOMIR

Published: May 7, 2008

It is a near certainty that no museum has ever celebrated its creation by enlisting 30 renowned painters, musicians or scientists to wave foam fingers at a lunchtime crowd while cheerleaders tumbled in a park next door. But that was the endearing if goofy sight at the end of a news conference Tuesday when Carl Lewis, Billie Jean King, Walt Frazier, Martina Navratilova, Eli Manning and others waggled those red appendages on a stage in Lower Manhattan to herald Wednesday's opening of the Sports Museum of America.

Art might have been altogether different if Picasso had worn a cheese head.

Located at 26 Broadway in the old Standard Oil building overlooking Bowling Green, the museum is a 25,000-square-foot hall of fame for nearly every sport (don't search its galleries for squash yet), with artifacts, films, videos and interactive exhibits. Its purposes are to exalt sports by using modern museum technology and display artistry, and to provide a big-city location in a tourist mecca for fans resistant to driving to halls of fame in Cooperstown, Canton, Springfield, Newport, Oneonta or Fort Lauderdale.

And by the way, it's costly, at $27 for adults and $20 for children 4 to 14 years old.

That is more than the Museum of Modern Art ($20 for adults) or the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum ($22). Unlike those institutions, the sports museum is run as a for-profit business, an anomaly in the industry.

From what could be viewed on a tour of parts of the museum -- final work was still going on through late Tuesday -- the mission of its founder and chief executive, Philip Schwalb, has been fulfilled by following a design philosophy that is playful and smart but never veers from the simple joy of gawking at mass quantities of sports stuff.

Dara Torres's swim cap is here, and so are Sandy Koufax's 1963 Cy Young award; the ball from Ty Cobb's 3,000th hit; Tim Tebow's speech notes before accepting his Heisman Trophy last year; and the sportswriter Grantland Rice's reference letter for John Heisman, the trophy's namesake, to be athletic director at the Downtown Athletic Club. (He got the job.)

On the floor of the Billie Jean King International Women's Center (home to the Women's Sports Foundation's hall of fame) are four video screens, each separated by a few feet of wooden flooring, that eerily depict a swimmer, the shadows of two tennis players and jump ropers in action. In the baseball gallery, visitors can grip rectangular screens and tilt them to conjure historical video like Reggie Jackson's three-homer World Series game in 1977 and Cal Ripken Jr.'s 2,131st consecutive game in 1995.

Fans can hold the bats of Alex Rodriguez, Ichiro Suzuki and Ken Griffey Jr.; they're tethered to the inside of a display case, but there is enough slack to feel their weight.

Some of the interactivity is simple, like calling up the statistics and biographies of Olympians on touch screens. Some are more involving, like donning a goalie's mask to feel the sensation of a puck flying at your face (which I did not see).

The first gallery that visitors enter, ''Dreaming Big,'' embodies a loftier purpose beyond gazing at meaningful tchotchkes. Videos, photographs and artifacts of great athletes as youngsters are displayed in what look like portholes, with the goal to inspire young fans.

Videos of Tiger Woods, Venus Williams and Michelle Kwan complement Derek Jeter's Little League jersey, Jeff Gordon's goggles from his go-kart racing days, a $2 bill Curtis Martin got from his grandmother and wore in his sock for good luck, one of the Barbie dolls Nancy Lopez received from her parents for her golf successes and King's fourth-grade report card (her teacher noted her student's ''excellent sense of fair play.'').

An immersion theater, with its 10-foot-high, 65-foot-long screen that wraps nearly halfway around the room, shows a film packed with familiar highlights and images. But the producers have made those visuals -- from Kerri Strug's vault, on a bum ankle, at the 1996 Summer Olympics to Hank Aaron's 715th home run -- thrillingly new by splitting them into five or six smaller screens, juxtaposing film, video and photos, backed by the narration of Dick Enberg, with his classic big-game voice.

Inside the Olympic gallery, with light from the multicolored rings on its ceiling casting a warm glow, Kurt Angle's gold medal shares display space with Dick Button's figure skating jacket and Bob Beamon's warmup pants. A few feet away, Al Oerter's 1968 discus is a roommate to Bruce Jenner's warmup jacket. Jesse Owens's sweater and diary, among other artifacts from the 1936 Berlin Games, are in another display case.

Inside a display case devoted to the 1980 United States men's Olympic hockey team, the treasured artifact is the American flag that Jim Craig, the goalie, draped himself in. And in front of the case stood Craig, talking again about that enduring miracle.

PHOTO: Carl Lewis looking over a display at the Sports Museum of America. The museum, which is in Lower Manhattan, opened Wednesday. (PHOTOGRAPH BY JUSTIN LANE/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY)